Art History: Contemporary Art

Item discusses three Surrealist installations: Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938), "Dream of Venus" pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1939) and First Papers of Surrealism (1942).

Traces the history of Abstract Expressionism, and examines its political implications and the cultural context in which it developed.

"This book by Lea Vergine, which discusses seventeen different art movements in separate chapters, offers, within the panorama of contemporary art criticism books, a blend between a handy art-history manual and an assessment of a cultural adventure that has passed through and overturned the parameters of taste of the last forty years."

Modern and contemporary art can be both baffling and beautiful; it can also be innovative, political, and disturbing. This book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of the period as a whole, clarifying the artists and their works along the way. Closely informed by new critical approaches, it concentrates on the relationship between American and European art from the end of the Second World War to the eve of the new millennium. Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst are among many artists discussed, with careful attention being given to the political and cultural worlds they inhabited. Moving along a clear timeline, the author highlights key movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and performance art to explain the theoretical and issue-based debates that have provided the engine for the art of this period.

"Illustrated survey of performance from the 1960s to the present ... features sections on politics; theater, music, and opera; the body; identity; feminism and multiculturalism; new dance; the spoken word; video; rock and roll; and much more. Artists' biographies, a chronology, and a bibliography are included ..."

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-five recent interviews shed new light on these artists--their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

Through the work of minimalism's five key practitioners (Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol le Witt and Robert Morris), this book examines in words and pictures the defining characteristics, and the debates, of minimalist art.

Boettger's narrative is the first comprehensive history of Earthworks, setting the movement in its cultural, art historical, and political contexts of the late 1960s. The Earthworks movement, the forerunner of Land Art, began in the U.S. with Robert Smithson in the late 1960s and included Walter DeMaria, Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, and Jan Dibbets.

"Abundantly illustrated with frames and sequences, Video Art offers a history of the medium seen through the perspectives of its early practitioners - such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, who used the video camera as an extension of their own bodies - through the vast array of conceptual, political, personal and lyrical installations of the 1980s and 1990s by such artists as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mary Lucier and Michal Rovner, in which the possibilities of narrative were expanded, to the present digital revolution. In this postmedium age, artists from Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham and Doug Aitken to Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Lynn Hershman are exploring the hybridization of technology, combining and recombining video with a vast array of other materials - digital video, film, DVD, computer art, CD-roms, graphics, animation and virtual reality - to form new artistic expressions.

In this highly accessible introduction to American art since the 1970s, Linda Weintraub offers art lovers a readable exploration of some of the most important artists and movements of the past three decades. Today artists routinely dissolve the old boundaries of art by creating works that neither hang on walls nor adorn pedestals, and often willfully overturn conventions of aesthetic value, permanence and optical reward. Curator and educator Weintraub has researched and/or interviewed 35 prominent radical artists and here explores their common concerns, creative processes and media.

This book marks a new, original and authoritative re-examination of a major turning point in late twentieth-century art. Since the mid 1960s Conceptual art - an art that consists of ideas, written down, enacted or simply carried in your head - has directly challenged the very notion that a work of art is by definition an object of visual pleasure. Conceptual art is first and foremost an art of questions. The book is one of the most rigorous, authoritative surveys of this influential movement.

The abstract art movement Op art came to international attention in the mid-1960s, an era of global social and technological change. The movement, which placed emphasis on viewer perception by exploring optical effects in painting, sculpture and light installation, quickly gained in popularity but met with considerable criticism. This important book published to accompany the first major Op art exhibition by on American museum in twenty-five years, examines the development of the movement, its cultural context and its widespread impact on advertising, fashion and film-making. Featuring visually stunning works by such key figures as Josef Albers, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, Optic Nerve offers a timely reappraisal of this highly influential movement.

"Far from being the latest movement or a new development in contemporary art, installation art, one could argue, is only the most recent manifestation of the oldest tradition in art, going as far back as the prehistoric paintings on cave walls at Lascaux. Fundamental to this work are its habitation and incorporation of a physical site, a connection to real conditions - be they visual, historical, or social - and often, a bridging of traditional art boundaries." "Blurring the Boundaries examines the subject of installation art through the permanent collection and exhibition record of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, an institution with a unique heritage in support of such art dating back to the 1960s."-

This volume provides an overview of 12 significant and internationally successful female artists. Within the context of the broad cultural shifts that occurred in 1970s America, many art historians and curators have questioned the exclusion of women from both the pantheon of famous artists and the display floors of contemporary museums. This work describes the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Among the photographers and video-makers whose work receives serious attention in this powerfully argued book are Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, James Welling, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Through in-depth profiles and dynamic behind-the-scenes footage featuring artists speaking directly about their inspirations and ideas, Season Five shows a broad range of artistic practice, technical innovation, and experimentation, from artists tackling large-scale collaborative projects in hangar-like studios to those working in the quiet of more intimate studio settings.

Unparalleled in access to today's young artists, this unique series takes viewers into artists' studios, homes, and communities to provide an intimate view of their lives, work, creative processes, and sources of inspiration. The four one-hour programs present 18 artists working in the United States

In a short but intense creative life of just seven years, Klein painted over a thousand pictures which are among the classics of modern art. This book offers a sample of his work.

These essays and pieces on Marcel Duchamp include his obituary from "Artforum"; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; and Donald Judd's investigation of Rose Slavy. The guide is illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces.

A revised edition of a retrospective on the Venice Biennale grand prize-winning artist incorporates the last ten years of his career including his retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1997, in a lavishly illustrated portrait that traces his early years, the creation of his famous combines and his work with new technologies.

The pictorial creations by American artist Cy Twombly have represented, for more than 50 years, a sort of enigma that reinforces the mythic status of the artist. This book, takes into consideration Twombly's immense and complex body of work from the 1950s up through his current works, offers a thematic and chronological interpretation of his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages.

Contents:
Valley curtain, Grand Hogback, Rifle, Colorado (1970-72) -- Running fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California (1972-76) -- Surrounded islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida (1980-83) -- Pont Neuf wrapped, Paris (1975-85) -- Umbrellas Japan - USA (Japan side) (1984-91) -- Umbrellas Japan - USA (California side) (1984-91) -- Wrapped Reichstag Berlin (1971-95) -- Wrapped trees Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Richen-Basel, Switzerland (1997-98) -- Gates project for Central Park, New York City (2003-2004)

This catalogue accompanying a blockbuster retrospective traveling exhibition opening at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in Sept. 2004 is THE major study of Robert Smithson (1938-1973), who is most renowned as an early Earthworks artist and creator of Spiral Jetty, a fifteen-hundred-foot rock coil dramatically situated in the Great Salt Lake.

Eduardo Paolozzi is a major figure in postwar British art: a father of pop art, a creator of key icons of the nuclear age, a brilliant manipulator of the images produced by the media, an iconoclast and traditionalist, an outsider and academician.

A retrospective volume of Anselm Kiefer's work, this catalog addresses the artist's entire career through the lens of one compelling theme. From his earliest sculptures to his recent highly textured paintings, Anselm Kiefer has woven themes of heaven and earth into his work, exploring the polarities of these ideas while struggling to define the transcendent quality that places art squarely in between. Destruction and rebirth, glory and shame, sin and redemption all figure largely in Kiefer's often controversial depictions of Germany's physical and cultural landscape. This catalog of more than sixty reproductions includes Kiefer's first work, Heaven, as well as numerous other rare early works. It features watercolors produced specifically for the publication as well as an interview with the artist.

This insightful book--published in conjunction with a major exhibition on Eakins--presents a fresh perspective on the artist and his remarkable accomplishments. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late 19th century.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition ... October 30-November 30, 1992"

The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials.This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years.

John Cage has been described as the most influential composer of the last half of the twentieth century. His work and ideas - about silence, indeterminacy, nonintention, art's role in bringing the everyday object to our attention, the singularity of performance - have had influence not only in the world of music but also in dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry. Among his friends and collaborators have been longtime associate Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The biography includes comprehensive chronologies of his musical and visual works.

"This book offers a detailed presentation of Richard Serra's entire career, from his early experiments with materials like rubber, neon, and lead to the environmentally scaled steel works of recent years, including three monumental new sculptures created for the exhibition that this book accompanies."

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents.

"Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of the photographs of Diane Arbus at the Museum of Modern Art. Edited and designed by Doon Arbus ... and Marvin Israel."

This catalogue raisonne, unlike most print reference works, describes in detail all extant and documented proofs of Frankenthaler's prints, recording measurements, colors, inscriptions, and the relationship of each proof to the final edition print. Ultimately, the trial, working, and other proofs constitute a journal of Frankenthaler's work, one that preserves and reveals the creative process as well as the effectiveness of the contemporary print workshop. The author, Pegram Harrison, conducted numerous interviews with Frankenthaler as well as extensive research into her archives and those of the publishers of Frankenthaler's prints. Suzanne Boorsch's comprehensive introductory essay places Frankenthaler's work in the context both of contemporaneous printmaking and the artist's own development over a thirty-year period. All of Frankenthaler's 235 edition prints are reproduced in full color, as are more than seventy proofs; there are also an additional seventy black-and-white illustrations, including photographs of the artist at various workshops.

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns' work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. In this book, leading scholars, a conservator, and a contemporary artist consider Johns activity in this critical decade and discuss many of his iconic paintings, such as Target with Four Faces (1955), Diver (1962), Periscope ( Hart Crane ) (1963), and Arrive-Depart (1963).

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture.